Status of ACE License Submission

Russell Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Thu Sep 22 02:20:49 UTC 2005


Douglas C. Schmidt writes:
 > Unfortunately, the Vanderbilt University, Washington University, and UC
 > Irvine lawyers asked us to explicitly mention some things in the license
 > at

Well, for one, you need to consider who is paying whom here.  A lawyer
is an employee of the university, and should give you legal advice in
context with the goals of the university.  If one of the goals is "We
want to switch to an existing open source license" then that makes the
lawyer's job one of choosing a license that meets the remaining goals.

For another, there is case law that says that warranty disclaimers
which are not clearly present (in the case law, it was mixed case just
as in the ACE license) are not enforcible.  My understanding is that
it is not a strong precedent, however given the cost of making the
warranty disclaimer more forceful by putting it into UPPER CASE, it is
likely that a judge would go along with the precedent.

So it appears (to me) that you are already getting bad advice from
these lawyers.  All the more reason to tell them that they should
choose from an existing one rather than creating one de novo.

 > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
 > 
 > and the fact that we already modified the DOC group license in response
 > to feedback from you folks it seems odd that you're taking such a
 > restricted view.  If there are specific things in the current DOC group
 > license that are showstoppers please let me know.

Yes.  Your license is not reusable by any other party.  May I suggest
that rather than creating Yet Another License which nobody else is
going to use, you switch to using the Apache 2.0 License?  It seems to
cover all your bases better than the BSD license and better than your
own license.  For example, the ACE license doesn't give the recipient
a patent license.

I have marked up the ACE license with the applicable Apache terms and
put it at http://russnelson.com/ACE-license.html

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